Bingo! None of the banks or online transactions will use it because it isn't cross platform and AMD doesn't have a big enough share of the CPU market so the only ones that will use it is those who want DRM on top of their DRM.
I've been a loyal AMD CPU customer but if this is the best they can do we are SOL. Thuban was the last good CPU they've put out, the whole Bulldozer design is a netburst sized fail, the Bobcats were good but they haven't updated them in ages and now THIS, this is the best they can come up with?
I have a sick feeling in my stomach we may have just been shown the beginning of the end guys, AMD may end up just like Nvidia, selling GPUs with ARM chips for mobile which will leave Intel standing alone in X86 and if that is the case then we are royally fucked. I don't know how many here remember but once upon a time Intel stood alone and the price of chips was bug fucking crazy, so i can only hope someone at AMD grows a brain, gets rid of the "crippled half core" faildozer design and goes back to the drawing board because more DRM isn't a way to get folks buying your chips AMD.
I'll get hate for pointing this out but truth is truth, how EXACTLY are they supposed to test and see if it was the hardware when its quite possible that a bad Linux driver could damage the hardware? I'm not saying Linux is bad, i'm saying we ARE dealing with a consumer laptop and we all know consumer laptops aren't great when it comes to cooling in the first place and are usually pretty stingy when it comes to heat sensors and with "thin and light" being the big buzz words frankly it don't take much to overheat one if a driver isn't shutting something down as it should. hell just keeping the HDD from parking could create some serious heat and whose to say that it was respecting the temps on the GPU or was monitoring correctly?
In the end with most consumer units you are talking about MAYBE $40 profit at best, that certainly isn't gonna pay for extensive testing to see if a particular distro respects the onboard sensors or pushed the hardware a little too hard. This is why we have Linux vendors who DO test hardware to make sure it runs well with Linux, and why a Linux laptop will be more expensive than windows, because they can test Windows on a single unit which they may sell 60,000 units of whereas somebody like NewEgg wouldn't sell enough of this particular unit with Linux to even pay for the testing.
So I wouldn't be too quick to blame newEgg, because to use a/. car analogy it would be like getting pissed at Ford when your new Focus throws a rod trying to pull a boat. she bought a laptop that never said it was supported by Linux, hadn't been built for or tested for linux, and the costs of doing so would be more than the unit was worth. This is one thing i have to agree on with the FOSS advocates here, if you want to run Linux go to a company like System76 that sell Linux supported hardware. otherwise you are just rolling the dice and could get burned as this young lady nearly was.
But the only way for NewEgg to see if it was Linux would have been to 1.-Take an identical laptop, 2.-Install the same distro and version she did, 3.-Run some stress tests and see if the unit behaved as it did under Windows. that is simply too much to expect for a low profit commodity item friend.
That was a defect in the EARLY AMD units, which if you would have bothered looking at the date of the video was 2001, so I seriously doubt that anybody is still gonna be using those 800MHz chips anymore. Any AMD from Athlon up simply throttles down. Frankly i've seen Semprons and Athlons here at the shop where the HSF was so caked up with dirt and grime it was obvious the blades haven't turned in months and all it did was slow down, no burning.
I know you are being funny but everyone here seems to be forgetting that until Win 8 is RTM no portable Windows exists that isn't a hacked together mess because MSFT simply didn't design their OS to do that.
I mean HOW MANY TIMES have we heard complaints about Windows GPU drivers on this very site? Wasn't there an article just last week about how ATI drivers didn't play nice with full system ASLR? Now you are talking about hacking the living shit out of the registry so that calls to C: will either work with a variable or to some low assigned letter like X and people HONESTLY think the GPU drivers aren't gonna be a problem and work perfectly in such an environment? What?
While i'm glad this person got her money back testing hardware is NOT something one should use a hacked Windows live tester for. there are tester CDs designed to test hardware (I use Ultimate Boot CD myself, which there is a version with a Live XP for doing virus scans but that's not for testing the actual hardware) because frankly all those hacked together WinPE based "Live windows" are just what it says on the tin, "Preinstall environments" and one shouldn't expect Windows drivers to magically function completely normal in an environment they simply weren't built for, nor should someone expect a Windows with a hacked all to hell registry to behave no different than one installed properly.
IMHO this simply makes no sense, you can't say Windows is buggy one minute and then say you can magically make it run perfectly in ways it was never designed for, that does not compute.
If its anything like the windows "Live" thumbsticks I've used they too are buggy because frankly windows wasn't really meant to run like that and thus required a lot of "hacks' to the registry to make it work.
Not saying a live Windows doesn't have its uses, i use an XP Live CD to test for viruses and to get files off an infected machine but I don't think I'd trust it as a hardware tester, just too many unknown variables, especially with drivers.
That would make sense IF they came OOTB with AD and GPO support but they do not so its pointless and NO advantage over iPad. It would be like saying "Hey we gave it Outlook! No Exchange support though" so there goes the only damned advantage you had for those that actually like Outlook.
While i'm damned glad i'm out of the hell that is corporate IT talking to some friends that still do that work BYOD is the hot new thing and they are NOT bringing in WinPhones or Wintabs, its iPhones, HTC Droids, and iPads. Without AD and GPO support frankly WinRT doesn't give anyone any advantage over iPad and Android and in fact brings more baggage since IT has already been dealing with iOS and Droid and worked out policies for them.
Frankly after using win 8 CP at the shop for a month and letting customers try it (and they hate it BTW) the ONLY answer i can come up with is arrogance, plain and simple. Ballmer and Sinofsky seem to be under this delusion they can just roll into the market with a subpar product and use their name and capital to crush like they did with win9x in the 90s or like what they did with Linux in netbooks, but in both of those cases they had the huge library of X86 programs to help them. Here? What good is MS Office being included without AD? What advantages does win 8 RT bring to the table that iOS and Android don't have? i have thought long and hard about this and I'm drawing a blank. its not intuitive or easily discoverable, it doesn't have the branding like Apple or the buzz like Droid, it just doesn't have any real advantage to push over the others.
But just as with any other business it doesn't take long to go under with a bad rep. While i'm not into bitcoins myself it seems to me to be like dealing with any other small business, you do small transactions and hedge your bets and try to find those with the best reps and go from there. as someone who does plenty of business with small shops across the Internet I've found that by sticking to this formula I've never been burnt for more than a few dollars and the amount I've made thanks to lower prices has more than made me a profit above the small losses.
so i really don't see a problem here and i'd certainly trust myself to find reputable small businesses to do business with than i would trust a Greek bank ATM so I can certainly see the appeal. given the choice of trusting myself or a shaky banking system i'd choose me every time. Sure there will be a few that get swindled, but show me ANYTHING where a few don't get swindled. hell we've seen morons give fortunes to Nigerian princes for the love of Pete and I wouldn't say the email system shouldn't be used because those dumbasses couldn't spot an obvious con. in the end it comes down to common sense, superpower though it may be.
Uhhh...friend? the biggest users of Office is corporate and without AD its a non starter, so just saying "We have Office!" don't mean shit when you are pushing a CONSUMER device. Do you honestly see many people going "Wow this ipad sure is nice, too bad it doesn't come with MS office, i could sure use me some Excel right about now" because i don't, because for consumers frankly Google docs does what they need.
So having office alone doesn't justify the price. It would be like saying "Hey we have Outlook, no Exchange support though" because you just made sure folks that would actually WANT Outlook won't take it, the whole thing is just head scratching stupid.
The problem is, which MSFT and the X86 OEMs are now just waking up to what much be a fricking nightmare for them, is that X86 passed "good enough" several chips ago and is now well into "insanely overpowered" for the vast majority, which any PC retailer would have been happy to tell them.
You see MSFT and the OEMs got spoiled by the "MHz Wars" where a PC rarely lasted 3 years, be it in the business or the consumer space. Now I have several customers using late model P4s or early models duals for plenty of back line jobs, we are talking 7 and 8 year old PCs, why? Because frankly the jobs they have simply aren't stressing that HT enabled late model P4 and the dual cores give them more power than they need. Even a geek like me that usually likes more power sold my full size laptop for an E350 netbook, which is about the weakest chip that does HD video, why? Because for mobile usage frankly even a low end chip like the E350 has tons of cycles to spare, hell there are videos of guys playing L4D and Crysis on them.
So you see THAT is why Ballmer and Co are crapping themselves in fear, they have just come to the realization that new PCs will be sold ONLY when the last one dies, because unlike the MHz wars there simply hasn't been a "killer app" that pushes even a 6 year old multicore. Hell i gave my GF a bottom of the line Athlon triple for Xmas to replace her aging P4 and even with that low end chip she has yet to hit above 45% CPU utilization, there just isn't enough tasks she can come up with to keep the chips fed. That is why MSFT is willing to crap on the desktop, because they know other than those that die during the release of Win 8 (which i have a feeling will have downgrade rights like Vista) people simply won't be buying them.Even a low end laptop or netbook treated with a little TLC can last 5 years or more simply because the chips aren't getting slammed hard and they don't have the crazy heat cycling like the old P4 mobiles had.
Since MSFT sells software this must be a hell of a shock, but its one we in the PC retail could have told them would happen once the Pentium Ds and X2s became mainstream. Hell even gaming isn't slamming the chips like they once were, with the Intel duals and AMD quads still getting good performance in most mainstream games. there really isn't a point in buying a new machine when the old one isn't even being stressed, its just pointless.
Uhhh we are talking about WinRT, aka Windows on ARM or WOA, so those apps? Won't actually run any better than they do on an iPad. THAT is why its a massive failwhale of MS Bob epic scale, because the ONLY reason people buy Windows is for the X86 programs like you just named which won't actually run.
Sadly unless there is a full press revolt by the board there simply CAN'T be a revolving door at MSFT, because between the monkey and his BFF Gates they own 60% of the company. I can only hope the stock tanks enough with the Win 8 fiasco that even gates won't be able to hold off the pitchforks and will get Ballmer to step down, but more likely Ballmer has anticipated this and is setting Sinofsky up for the fall by how much he has been shoving Sinofsky in front of the cameras. I have a hard timing feeling sorry for Sinofsky as he does seem a clueless arrogant PHB but if it allows Ballmer to retain power its still bad for the company.
That is why I've been saying that everybody needs to hang on, as the education bubble will burst soon, followed by the financial bubble. One of the guys in the apt building next door actually committed suicide over student loans recently, being so buried in debt that he'd never be able to pay off the bill and being hounded by the collectors and I believe we will see millions simply get disposable phones and will "drop off the grid" as much as possible simply because student loans have made living in the system impossible. I live next to a college and have already met several like that, taking cash only work and doing their best to simply drop out because of the collectors and thanks to there being no real way to ever get rid of this debt when the bubble bursts you are gonna see a massive amount of debt that like the housing simply gets repackaged and sold like a hot potato until the whole thing falls down. you simply can't charge $50k-$80k for even a lousy education and expect the average person to be able to work their way out of it with McJobs, its is simply not possible.
Then the final bubble will burst, all the IRA and 401Ks without anyone to put money in and no real safe places to go will simply have no place to go. I watched a talk recently (sorry i didn't think to save the link) with several fund managers and they were discussing this, how they are quickly running out of places to put the money. The former go to places either pay nothing or are too unstable, so as one put it "We are spending all our time on the phones just trying to find foreign places with stability as we are finding less and less in the USA that meets that criteria".
Did you know that nearly half the USA pays no taxes at all, because after bills are paid they are simply too poor? And the disability and social security payouts are shooting up as more people file just to survive and to be able to afford their ever increasing costs of medications. I can tell you with relatives on disability that once on they can never get off, that they end up in a catch 22 where the meds they require which would allow them to work are so expensive that if they got a job they couldn't afford their meds so all they could do is stay where they are, which is grinding poverty. One uncle could easily work but the med that allows him his ability to function costs over $100k a year and he'd be lucky to qualify for a 30K a year job so he simply sits at home watching TV.
Just read this article and you will see that just looking at the numbers there is no way its sustainable long term, you have too few making real money and too many in life sucking desperate poverty for the system as is to survive. And as far as the rest of the world i have to wonder...what do they think will happen when a nuclear superpower falls apart? as we saw with the collapse of the USSR things can get nasty quickly and there won't be a USA to quietly come along and try to help if we fall.
Actually I would think it would be a better score for AMD than for Intel, as most tablets i've seen were used for portable PMPs and the AMD C and E series Bobcats are frankly perfect for that niche, much better than Atom now that Intel killed ION.
As for the product itself...WHAT...THE...FUCK...I used to make Vista comparisons but now that I've been playing with Win 8 CP for awhile at the shop, I have to wonder if it isn't actually the next MS Bob. How can a company that is so famous for using focus groups out the ass suddenly come up with such a poorly designed product from the user perspective? want to see how the average user fares on Win 8? Here see for yourself and I can tell you that in my shop? that's the perfectly typical reaction, followed by frustration and them walking away.
If the reports are accurate and Win8RT has no more support for AD and GPOs than an iPad I honestly can't see how it can do any better in that market as it doesn't really seem to follow tablet UI conventions either, its just not very intuitive or naturally discoverable. Charging premium prices when they couldn't give away WinPhone just cranks the WTF? knob to 11, as why would companies like Asus bend over backwards and pay crazy prices for an unproven product when they can get Android which IS a proven product, for free?
That is why I have to make comparisons to MS Bob, because like Bob not only is the UI nothing like what folks are expecting (and at least in my shop are wanting) but I just can't see who the market this is supposed to be for. Its not business, as no AD makes it not any better than the more popular iPad, its not consumers who find it unintuitive, its not high end ARM tablet buyers as Asus with Transformer and Apple with iPad 3 seem to have that market covered, so who? people who want their tablet to LOOK like their desktop OS but not actualy run the same programs on the two? Its just a head scratcher.
Well considering we are talking about a company with pretty much ZERO market share in tablets and cell phones to have the gold plated brass balls to think they can sell for more than iPad? To me this just shows Forbes is right, Ballmer IS the worst CEO out there.
Both he and Sinofsky have shown how completely clueless they are, both of the actual people that buy their products and of the market in general. Did anybody see Sinofsky's last conference on Win 8? Count how many times the moron says the word "touchscreen". i swear that dumbass honestly thinks he is gonna get the ENTIRE X86 market to switch to touchscreens, all so he can sell an OS that so far nobody has shown any interest in!
So if any MSFT execs read this? WinPhone was a FLOP, a MASSIVE FLOP that you spent hundreds of millions on that went exactly NOWHERE. I can tell you as a small retailer that the X86 version of Win 8 is looking to also be a MASSIVE FLOP with not a single customer that has played with the Win 8 CP unit in my shop expressing a desire to have your new OS. When you have had nothing but flops in an arena, and you competition which is NOT a flop is cheaper? That is NOT GOOD, that is horribly bad.
Frankly if I didn't know any better I'd swear that just like everyone says Elop at Nokia was a MSFT plant, so too were Ballmer and Sinofsky Apple or Google plants, but for the future of the company they are actually much worse than that, they are truly clueless of their own customers and of the market they are trying to sell to. The only way I can see this possibly flying is if they do massive subsidies of the hardware, losing money on every single unit as they did with the X360 at the start, and hoping their massive capital can basically buy them a chunk of the market. More likely from the talks I've seen Sinofsky is so damned arrogant that he honestly believes people will pay $900 for a WOA tablet which i think come Xmas he's gonna get a massive shock, what he is gonna see is his new baby is gonna be the next touchpad.
Gotta look on the bright side though, I have a feeling next summer Woot! is gonna be having massive sell offs of the turkeys and i bet the hardware will be nice so all of us who missed out on getting a touchpad will hopefully be able to score on for like $100 and the hackers will figure out a way to put Android on it.
Did you try just disabling the NIC? my net goes down about once every 3 months or so and I've NEVER had a problem playing a Steam game. it simply says something to the effect of "Cannot connection to Steam, do you wish to play in offline mode?" and that's it. after that all my games play just as they'd do if i was online, hassle free.
This is why i buy pretty much all my games from Steam and GOG but won't buy any always on DRM games like the Ubisoft crap nor will i buy D3. its a damned shame as me and my boys were hoping to all buy a copy but if we'd wanted an MMO we'd have went with LOTRO and not D3. So thanks for not taking our money blizzard, we bought 1&2 but now we'll just buy the TL2 4 pack and let the youngest gift the extra copy to a friend.
But we were talking about the history of the clones. Now remember at the time MSFT wasn't shit, they were a couple of smelly nerds in a fricking crappy office. he may have pointed out a better deal or something but if you think gates could have made old big blue do shit then you are wrong. hell the ONLY reason we have those wonderful AMD chips now is that big blue FORCED Intel to allow second sources. of course i'm sure you know later chips came from the Cyrix devs but at the time AMD was simply a cloner that managed to ramp up the speed on some Intel chips.
BTW if you are interested in this stuff look up "AMD developer speaks out Bulldozer' to see one of the former AMD guys lay out why the company went to crap, its pretty enlightening. Sorry I can't look it up for you but I'm chatting with a nephew at the same time as I write this so I'm juggling here, but according to him AMD's previous CEO basically fired all the decent guys and went to automated layouts which gives a good 20%+ speed hit, and then on TOP of that epic fail didn't even bother to tell MSFT about their new designs so that Windows won't really support Faildozer until Win 8. that's one of the reasons i just built a Thuban for the oldest and gave my youngest my Deneb, as i didn't want us to buy Intel because of Faildozer.
And i'll be happy to agree with you that today X86 is simply one of several layers of micro-ops but we are talking about 1982-1999, the era of the rise of the PC and chips back then did NOT for the most part use a translation layer like they do today and yet X86 exploded simply because it could scale REAL well while 68k and others didn't. You have to remember chips were speeding up so quickly that frankly EVERYBODY ended up OCing, just so they wouldn't be completely screwed! I was one of the lucky ones with a Celeron 300a, that damned thing could nearly double the clock on air.
But if you can point me to where gates picked 8088 or even give a hint what I need to look for I'll certainly check it out as i was under the impression he didn't really get any major power until Win 3.x and the breakup of MS OS/2. BTW you want something to get pissed at gates over read this and see how he managed to hold everyone back on DOS based crap just by showing some fake screencaps and BSing his ass off. Even if you don't care for the man you have to admit it took some giant brass balls to pull THAT one off. The funny part is somebody at Apple tried the same trick but then fucked up and gave a developer demo for Copeland which showed, to rip off an old Internet meme "IT'S A FAAAAKE!" by showing the thing couldn't run for a minute or two without crashing. gates was smart enough to ONLY show screencaps and not the actual running OS.
Not to mention so far the whole globalism scam has done nothing but import and export misery. 9 out of the 10 most cancerous cities are in China now, make it top 20 and India is just as bad, meanwhile every job in America is becoming a "McJob" thanks to "Hire not to hire an American".
Frankly i wouldn't even say it was under education, as if the supply and demand curve weren't allowed to be tilted then the demand (and wages and benefits) would go up and people would pursue these careers but instead because Habib can get a degree (or lie his ass off, like 10 years of Win 8 exp) for $10k and it costs 7 times that or more for an American why the fuck should ANY American want to go into ANY of the fields the H1-Bs are currently taking?
It is JUST like what happened with construction. there were MANY Americans willing and happy to work in construction but they found they could hire Juan for $4 an hour and not pay benefits or workman's comp and suddenly there weren't any Americans on the construction sites anymore. it has gotten to bad that teens will yell "Immigra!" just to watch them scatter like deer here. Its fucking sad and pathetic is what it is, our whole damned country has been sold out to a handful at the top and We, the People will get the bill.
Why because I didn't jump in the "M$ Burns babies ZOMFG!" FOSSie circle jerk? this didn't have a damned thing to do with Linux, try sending a Win 7 laptop back with XP and YOU'LL GET THE SAME.
But hey, FOSSies and logic, like gas and fires, probably should be kept apart, ammiright?
I'm actually one that HAS stood up. my family bought D1 and D2 and loved them but we're buying Torchlight II instead. this whole mess just pissed off my boys and me, we were REALLY looking forward to each getting a copy and hooking up online, no more. Now we will hook up in TL2 and spend our money there, that is the only way to deal with a DRM tastic ripoff like this.
Oh and just for the record while i don't mind Steam DRM I will not buy any of the Ubisoft always on games either, so no assassins creed for me and mine, no way.
"All hail the one true god!" which is sadly EXACTLY what you sound like. you can't come up with an argument because the man's bullshit isn't consistent so you go "la la la M$ Ninja poopy head, la la la" which is why the community looks like nutters for associating WITH a nutter.
So be sure to stick your fingers in your ears tightly, make sure those dogma blinders are nice and secure, and I leave you with a final image of your hero acting like a crazy homeless guy. just remember THAT is who you are defending, but hey, don't let logic get in the way of worshiping your deity.
MSFT didn't actually have jack shit to do with 8088 poo, it was the simple fact that thanks to the contract they had signed IBM could second source X86 up to the 286 and thus could build in house or subcontract. it didn't have a damned thing to do with MSFT at that point it was ALL IBM. If you'll look back to the early days of the clones you'll see it was IBM and NOT MSFT that actually gave the cloners their fist break, as IBM refused to go with the 386 because they couldn't produce it in house so Compaq by selling the 386 was able to offer a faster machine at a cheaper price. And Motorola was NEVER able to get the 68k to scale well, saying that money would have magically changed that don't change reality and the fact that when they still had big name companies like Apple depending on them they simply couldn't come through.
And if you'll look at the actual die the X86 translation layer ain't shit, its not even the size of UVD 1 on the itty bitty C Series AMD chips. It is simply a cheap way to get compatibility with literally billions of dollars worth of software that frankly didn't and i would argue wouldn't exist if things had stayed as they were, with every company using a different chip. And if x86 is so crap tell me WHY EXACTLY has nobody come up with ANYTHING better? Itanic sucked for anything that wasn't HIGHLY optimized by the compiler which is damned near impossible to get perfect without stalling, POWER is a pig, ARM doesn't scale without power usage jumping like mad, if what you are saying is true this would be the perfect opportunity to replace it, yet nobody is even attempting it. Why?
Simple, because the X86 instruction set doesn't cause enough overhead to frankly worry about when a good ten times the die space is being used for caches because you simply can't feed the chips fast enough. if x86 was such an overhead then Intel wouldn't be whipping out sub 4w Atoms and AMD wouldn't be cooking up 9w dual cores like flapjacks. X86 works, it works well, it has billions of dollars in programs people want to run, and its cheap. Even with so many sinking shitpiles of money into it ARM hasn't been able to even equal the power of an early Athlon or P4 without having DSPs like broadcom HD decoders to share the load because the chip itself is simply too weak for the task. there is nothing currently in the pipe nor was there anything at the time that could equal the IPC of the X86 CPUs. hell most chips aren't even getting the IPC of the first Core or Phenom chips released a half a decade ago, much less what AMD and Intel are releasing now.
Sheeeit, think THAT is bad? Look up "Ulrich Drepper arrogant" into the search engine of your choice and be prepared to see some EPIC douchebaggery! Seriously some of his rants are so epic I'm shocked he just doesn't reply with Goatse as that's pretty obviously what he thinks about those that DARE to disagree with him.
But you can see why some like Debian would move away, because they simply don't want to deal with such an epic douchenozzle. i have to wonder how many of the other lesser spotlighted FOSS projects have arrogant little all important shits like him running things. After all they aren't doing it for fame or money and we all know how many love to just be absolute assholes when given a little power. But IMHO it shows how the system is broken when someone like Drepper is still allowed to maintain and important piece as Glibc when he is so obviously a massive prick.
Not to mention its the classic self fulfilling prophecy: The POTUS and congress say "Americans need education and tech jobs will save us!" so Americans actually go into these fields...only to see they are supposed to "compete" with someone who paid less than $10k for THEIR degree while they pay several times that, so they don't go for tech degrees and these fortune 100 companies scream "We can't get any people!" (translation...We can't get any people who will work like a dog for scraps!) and the cycle continues to get worse.
Many of the guys I know have bailed out of tech completely simply because corps are following "How NOT to hire an American" as a how to guide and if they DO manage to get the job they are being expected to work 24/7/365 for frankly pathetic pay and the knowledge the corp will outsource them at the very first opportunity they get.
Honestly folks, give you people a SINGLE REASON why they should go into tech and IT, just one. there is ZERO loyalty, the pay is shit, the hours awful, and the corps as with TFA will fuck you over the first chance they get because they can treat Habib like a dog and pay him a good 20% less than you can live on thanks to your student loans. the first thing I told my oldest is DO NOT go into anything tech related and I was damned happy when i found out he wanted to be a doctor.
Lets face it folks as we saw a few weeks back with the article on why so few are going into IT, its because the corps are fucking the tech sector raw with bullshit like this. And despite what the globalists say here it totally is fucking over our country because these indian workers will go home and build the startups of tomorrow that will come up with the next big thing, while our tech and sciences are simply gutted. this destroys the normal give and take of supply and demand because otherwise the corps would be forced to treat workers less shitty and raise wages to get more people to take these roles being filled by H1-Bs, but because they can fuck over Americans AND treat Habib like dogshit the whole thing gets horribly tilted. When the whole thing falls down the corps will simply walk away, its the US citizens that will be left with the high unemployment, lack of Americans able to fill these roles, and debt.
Why did this person get marked as troll? That is pretty much SOP on the "I don't like it" returns, they charge a restock fee and it ends up sold as a return if they don't send it back to the factory and have it refurbed. heck best buy has a website dedicated to selling returns at marked down prices so i don't see why newegg wouldn't do a similar practice.
In the end this seems like a piece of trolling because you can bet your last dollar it don't have a damned thing to do with the OS being Linux, unless anybody here thinks they'd accept some new Windows 7 netbook if I sent it back with XP pro installed instead? We ALL know that when you return something you try to send it back as close to how you got it as possible.
And frankly the buyer in TFA was being a bit of a dumbass anyway. If you actually wanted supported hardware how many times have we heard "Well just buy it from a Linux dealer"? Its not like there is a shortage of Linux laptop dealers ATM, so basically the person in TFA got the lower price thanks to the total bullshit "Windows Tax" (which if it is WinHome or Starter the crapware makes it free and nobody is buying enough linLaptops to make it cheaper to produce than cranking out Windows machines) so this person was giving MSFT a sale for an OS they didn't want to get the lower prices and got bit in the ass. maybe if more people actually bought from Linux dealers instead of being selfish little jerks there would be enough demand for Linux that more places would actually carry it?
But that would ruin a perfectly good trolling article and a ton of "M$ Suxorz!" posts to rack up the page views, can't have that now can we?;-)
Sigh, I knew i shouldn't click on the response because i just KNEW you were gonna pick and choose tiny points in history instead of thinking big picture. YES X86 was good, we went from less than 20MHz to over a GHz in less than a decade and that was NOT AMD64, which is really just larger registers and some extra microcode, which is ironic that you like AMD64 since it was intel and NOT AMD that was actually trying to kill X86 at the time which led to AMD64. If you remember intel was trying to move everyone to Itanic and it was AMD recognizing the massive amount of Windows software made X86-64 a better move that kept X86 alive.
And I've said for years Intel should have been busted for antitrust, in fact i'd say you had a better case for antitrust over netburst than you did with MSFT over IE, but that is the company and NOT the arch. For the record i don't actually own ANY intel X86 units other than the old P4s in the shop i'm selling, all the machines me and my family own are AMD all the way. it doesn't change the fact they all run X86 code, its simply a preference and a dislike for the anticompetitive behavior of intel.
And arguing over whether the core translates or not is REALLY splitting hairs, because nobody really gives a crap what the core itself is doing, only that it will run the millions of programs already written. this is why i still have to support a few NOS boxes running Win2K because X86 has frankly been better at backwards compatibility than MSFT in this regard. that does NOT change the fact that without the economies of scale that came about because cloners could make a $5000 IBM PC for $1800 then computers as we know them simply wouldn't exist, they'd be toys for the rich just as they were for a good chunk of the 80s. The boom in memory, HDD space, it can all be traced back to having a single interface so that multiple companies could jump in and attempt to make a better mousetrap without having to build an entire computer and market it. Remember that before that the ONLY real way to get into the business was to do like Atari and Commodore and sell a whole system. There were a few local yokels selling for the oldS100 bus but that was it. It wasn't until we had a single platform that anybody could build for that the price dropped out from under the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo! None of the banks or online transactions will use it because it isn't cross platform and AMD doesn't have a big enough share of the CPU market so the only ones that will use it is those who want DRM on top of their DRM.
I've been a loyal AMD CPU customer but if this is the best they can do we are SOL. Thuban was the last good CPU they've put out, the whole Bulldozer design is a netburst sized fail, the Bobcats were good but they haven't updated them in ages and now THIS, this is the best they can come up with?
I have a sick feeling in my stomach we may have just been shown the beginning of the end guys, AMD may end up just like Nvidia, selling GPUs with ARM chips for mobile which will leave Intel standing alone in X86 and if that is the case then we are royally fucked. I don't know how many here remember but once upon a time Intel stood alone and the price of chips was bug fucking crazy, so i can only hope someone at AMD grows a brain, gets rid of the "crippled half core" faildozer design and goes back to the drawing board because more DRM isn't a way to get folks buying your chips AMD.
I'll get hate for pointing this out but truth is truth, how EXACTLY are they supposed to test and see if it was the hardware when its quite possible that a bad Linux driver could damage the hardware? I'm not saying Linux is bad, i'm saying we ARE dealing with a consumer laptop and we all know consumer laptops aren't great when it comes to cooling in the first place and are usually pretty stingy when it comes to heat sensors and with "thin and light" being the big buzz words frankly it don't take much to overheat one if a driver isn't shutting something down as it should. hell just keeping the HDD from parking could create some serious heat and whose to say that it was respecting the temps on the GPU or was monitoring correctly?
In the end with most consumer units you are talking about MAYBE $40 profit at best, that certainly isn't gonna pay for extensive testing to see if a particular distro respects the onboard sensors or pushed the hardware a little too hard. This is why we have Linux vendors who DO test hardware to make sure it runs well with Linux, and why a Linux laptop will be more expensive than windows, because they can test Windows on a single unit which they may sell 60,000 units of whereas somebody like NewEgg wouldn't sell enough of this particular unit with Linux to even pay for the testing.
So I wouldn't be too quick to blame newEgg, because to use a /. car analogy it would be like getting pissed at Ford when your new Focus throws a rod trying to pull a boat. she bought a laptop that never said it was supported by Linux, hadn't been built for or tested for linux, and the costs of doing so would be more than the unit was worth. This is one thing i have to agree on with the FOSS advocates here, if you want to run Linux go to a company like System76 that sell Linux supported hardware. otherwise you are just rolling the dice and could get burned as this young lady nearly was.
But the only way for NewEgg to see if it was Linux would have been to 1.-Take an identical laptop, 2.-Install the same distro and version she did, 3.-Run some stress tests and see if the unit behaved as it did under Windows. that is simply too much to expect for a low profit commodity item friend.
That was a defect in the EARLY AMD units, which if you would have bothered looking at the date of the video was 2001, so I seriously doubt that anybody is still gonna be using those 800MHz chips anymore. Any AMD from Athlon up simply throttles down. Frankly i've seen Semprons and Athlons here at the shop where the HSF was so caked up with dirt and grime it was obvious the blades haven't turned in months and all it did was slow down, no burning.
I know you are being funny but everyone here seems to be forgetting that until Win 8 is RTM no portable Windows exists that isn't a hacked together mess because MSFT simply didn't design their OS to do that.
I mean HOW MANY TIMES have we heard complaints about Windows GPU drivers on this very site? Wasn't there an article just last week about how ATI drivers didn't play nice with full system ASLR? Now you are talking about hacking the living shit out of the registry so that calls to C: will either work with a variable or to some low assigned letter like X and people HONESTLY think the GPU drivers aren't gonna be a problem and work perfectly in such an environment? What?
While i'm glad this person got her money back testing hardware is NOT something one should use a hacked Windows live tester for. there are tester CDs designed to test hardware (I use Ultimate Boot CD myself, which there is a version with a Live XP for doing virus scans but that's not for testing the actual hardware) because frankly all those hacked together WinPE based "Live windows" are just what it says on the tin, "Preinstall environments" and one shouldn't expect Windows drivers to magically function completely normal in an environment they simply weren't built for, nor should someone expect a Windows with a hacked all to hell registry to behave no different than one installed properly.
IMHO this simply makes no sense, you can't say Windows is buggy one minute and then say you can magically make it run perfectly in ways it was never designed for, that does not compute.
If its anything like the windows "Live" thumbsticks I've used they too are buggy because frankly windows wasn't really meant to run like that and thus required a lot of "hacks' to the registry to make it work.
Not saying a live Windows doesn't have its uses, i use an XP Live CD to test for viruses and to get files off an infected machine but I don't think I'd trust it as a hardware tester, just too many unknown variables, especially with drivers.
That would make sense IF they came OOTB with AD and GPO support but they do not so its pointless and NO advantage over iPad. It would be like saying "Hey we gave it Outlook! No Exchange support though" so there goes the only damned advantage you had for those that actually like Outlook.
While i'm damned glad i'm out of the hell that is corporate IT talking to some friends that still do that work BYOD is the hot new thing and they are NOT bringing in WinPhones or Wintabs, its iPhones, HTC Droids, and iPads. Without AD and GPO support frankly WinRT doesn't give anyone any advantage over iPad and Android and in fact brings more baggage since IT has already been dealing with iOS and Droid and worked out policies for them.
Frankly after using win 8 CP at the shop for a month and letting customers try it (and they hate it BTW) the ONLY answer i can come up with is arrogance, plain and simple. Ballmer and Sinofsky seem to be under this delusion they can just roll into the market with a subpar product and use their name and capital to crush like they did with win9x in the 90s or like what they did with Linux in netbooks, but in both of those cases they had the huge library of X86 programs to help them. Here? What good is MS Office being included without AD? What advantages does win 8 RT bring to the table that iOS and Android don't have? i have thought long and hard about this and I'm drawing a blank. its not intuitive or easily discoverable, it doesn't have the branding like Apple or the buzz like Droid, it just doesn't have any real advantage to push over the others.
But just as with any other business it doesn't take long to go under with a bad rep. While i'm not into bitcoins myself it seems to me to be like dealing with any other small business, you do small transactions and hedge your bets and try to find those with the best reps and go from there. as someone who does plenty of business with small shops across the Internet I've found that by sticking to this formula I've never been burnt for more than a few dollars and the amount I've made thanks to lower prices has more than made me a profit above the small losses.
so i really don't see a problem here and i'd certainly trust myself to find reputable small businesses to do business with than i would trust a Greek bank ATM so I can certainly see the appeal. given the choice of trusting myself or a shaky banking system i'd choose me every time. Sure there will be a few that get swindled, but show me ANYTHING where a few don't get swindled. hell we've seen morons give fortunes to Nigerian princes for the love of Pete and I wouldn't say the email system shouldn't be used because those dumbasses couldn't spot an obvious con. in the end it comes down to common sense, superpower though it may be.
Uhhh...friend? the biggest users of Office is corporate and without AD its a non starter, so just saying "We have Office!" don't mean shit when you are pushing a CONSUMER device. Do you honestly see many people going "Wow this ipad sure is nice, too bad it doesn't come with MS office, i could sure use me some Excel right about now" because i don't, because for consumers frankly Google docs does what they need.
So having office alone doesn't justify the price. It would be like saying "Hey we have Outlook, no Exchange support though" because you just made sure folks that would actually WANT Outlook won't take it, the whole thing is just head scratching stupid.
The problem is, which MSFT and the X86 OEMs are now just waking up to what much be a fricking nightmare for them, is that X86 passed "good enough" several chips ago and is now well into "insanely overpowered" for the vast majority, which any PC retailer would have been happy to tell them.
You see MSFT and the OEMs got spoiled by the "MHz Wars" where a PC rarely lasted 3 years, be it in the business or the consumer space. Now I have several customers using late model P4s or early models duals for plenty of back line jobs, we are talking 7 and 8 year old PCs, why? Because frankly the jobs they have simply aren't stressing that HT enabled late model P4 and the dual cores give them more power than they need. Even a geek like me that usually likes more power sold my full size laptop for an E350 netbook, which is about the weakest chip that does HD video, why? Because for mobile usage frankly even a low end chip like the E350 has tons of cycles to spare, hell there are videos of guys playing L4D and Crysis on them.
So you see THAT is why Ballmer and Co are crapping themselves in fear, they have just come to the realization that new PCs will be sold ONLY when the last one dies, because unlike the MHz wars there simply hasn't been a "killer app" that pushes even a 6 year old multicore. Hell i gave my GF a bottom of the line Athlon triple for Xmas to replace her aging P4 and even with that low end chip she has yet to hit above 45% CPU utilization, there just isn't enough tasks she can come up with to keep the chips fed. That is why MSFT is willing to crap on the desktop, because they know other than those that die during the release of Win 8 (which i have a feeling will have downgrade rights like Vista) people simply won't be buying them.Even a low end laptop or netbook treated with a little TLC can last 5 years or more simply because the chips aren't getting slammed hard and they don't have the crazy heat cycling like the old P4 mobiles had.
Since MSFT sells software this must be a hell of a shock, but its one we in the PC retail could have told them would happen once the Pentium Ds and X2s became mainstream. Hell even gaming isn't slamming the chips like they once were, with the Intel duals and AMD quads still getting good performance in most mainstream games. there really isn't a point in buying a new machine when the old one isn't even being stressed, its just pointless.
Uhhh we are talking about WinRT, aka Windows on ARM or WOA, so those apps? Won't actually run any better than they do on an iPad. THAT is why its a massive failwhale of MS Bob epic scale, because the ONLY reason people buy Windows is for the X86 programs like you just named which won't actually run.
Sadly unless there is a full press revolt by the board there simply CAN'T be a revolving door at MSFT, because between the monkey and his BFF Gates they own 60% of the company. I can only hope the stock tanks enough with the Win 8 fiasco that even gates won't be able to hold off the pitchforks and will get Ballmer to step down, but more likely Ballmer has anticipated this and is setting Sinofsky up for the fall by how much he has been shoving Sinofsky in front of the cameras. I have a hard timing feeling sorry for Sinofsky as he does seem a clueless arrogant PHB but if it allows Ballmer to retain power its still bad for the company.
That is why I've been saying that everybody needs to hang on, as the education bubble will burst soon, followed by the financial bubble. One of the guys in the apt building next door actually committed suicide over student loans recently, being so buried in debt that he'd never be able to pay off the bill and being hounded by the collectors and I believe we will see millions simply get disposable phones and will "drop off the grid" as much as possible simply because student loans have made living in the system impossible. I live next to a college and have already met several like that, taking cash only work and doing their best to simply drop out because of the collectors and thanks to there being no real way to ever get rid of this debt when the bubble bursts you are gonna see a massive amount of debt that like the housing simply gets repackaged and sold like a hot potato until the whole thing falls down. you simply can't charge $50k-$80k for even a lousy education and expect the average person to be able to work their way out of it with McJobs, its is simply not possible.
Then the final bubble will burst, all the IRA and 401Ks without anyone to put money in and no real safe places to go will simply have no place to go. I watched a talk recently (sorry i didn't think to save the link) with several fund managers and they were discussing this, how they are quickly running out of places to put the money. The former go to places either pay nothing or are too unstable, so as one put it "We are spending all our time on the phones just trying to find foreign places with stability as we are finding less and less in the USA that meets that criteria".
Did you know that nearly half the USA pays no taxes at all, because after bills are paid they are simply too poor? And the disability and social security payouts are shooting up as more people file just to survive and to be able to afford their ever increasing costs of medications. I can tell you with relatives on disability that once on they can never get off, that they end up in a catch 22 where the meds they require which would allow them to work are so expensive that if they got a job they couldn't afford their meds so all they could do is stay where they are, which is grinding poverty. One uncle could easily work but the med that allows him his ability to function costs over $100k a year and he'd be lucky to qualify for a 30K a year job so he simply sits at home watching TV.
Just read this article and you will see that just looking at the numbers there is no way its sustainable long term, you have too few making real money and too many in life sucking desperate poverty for the system as is to survive. And as far as the rest of the world i have to wonder...what do they think will happen when a nuclear superpower falls apart? as we saw with the collapse of the USSR things can get nasty quickly and there won't be a USA to quietly come along and try to help if we fall.
Actually I would think it would be a better score for AMD than for Intel, as most tablets i've seen were used for portable PMPs and the AMD C and E series Bobcats are frankly perfect for that niche, much better than Atom now that Intel killed ION.
As for the product itself...WHAT...THE...FUCK...I used to make Vista comparisons but now that I've been playing with Win 8 CP for awhile at the shop, I have to wonder if it isn't actually the next MS Bob. How can a company that is so famous for using focus groups out the ass suddenly come up with such a poorly designed product from the user perspective? want to see how the average user fares on Win 8? Here see for yourself and I can tell you that in my shop? that's the perfectly typical reaction, followed by frustration and them walking away.
If the reports are accurate and Win8RT has no more support for AD and GPOs than an iPad I honestly can't see how it can do any better in that market as it doesn't really seem to follow tablet UI conventions either, its just not very intuitive or naturally discoverable. Charging premium prices when they couldn't give away WinPhone just cranks the WTF? knob to 11, as why would companies like Asus bend over backwards and pay crazy prices for an unproven product when they can get Android which IS a proven product, for free?
That is why I have to make comparisons to MS Bob, because like Bob not only is the UI nothing like what folks are expecting (and at least in my shop are wanting) but I just can't see who the market this is supposed to be for. Its not business, as no AD makes it not any better than the more popular iPad, its not consumers who find it unintuitive, its not high end ARM tablet buyers as Asus with Transformer and Apple with iPad 3 seem to have that market covered, so who? people who want their tablet to LOOK like their desktop OS but not actualy run the same programs on the two? Its just a head scratcher.
Well considering we are talking about a company with pretty much ZERO market share in tablets and cell phones to have the gold plated brass balls to think they can sell for more than iPad? To me this just shows Forbes is right, Ballmer IS the worst CEO out there.
Both he and Sinofsky have shown how completely clueless they are, both of the actual people that buy their products and of the market in general. Did anybody see Sinofsky's last conference on Win 8? Count how many times the moron says the word "touchscreen". i swear that dumbass honestly thinks he is gonna get the ENTIRE X86 market to switch to touchscreens, all so he can sell an OS that so far nobody has shown any interest in!
So if any MSFT execs read this? WinPhone was a FLOP, a MASSIVE FLOP that you spent hundreds of millions on that went exactly NOWHERE. I can tell you as a small retailer that the X86 version of Win 8 is looking to also be a MASSIVE FLOP with not a single customer that has played with the Win 8 CP unit in my shop expressing a desire to have your new OS. When you have had nothing but flops in an arena, and you competition which is NOT a flop is cheaper? That is NOT GOOD, that is horribly bad.
Frankly if I didn't know any better I'd swear that just like everyone says Elop at Nokia was a MSFT plant, so too were Ballmer and Sinofsky Apple or Google plants, but for the future of the company they are actually much worse than that, they are truly clueless of their own customers and of the market they are trying to sell to. The only way I can see this possibly flying is if they do massive subsidies of the hardware, losing money on every single unit as they did with the X360 at the start, and hoping their massive capital can basically buy them a chunk of the market. More likely from the talks I've seen Sinofsky is so damned arrogant that he honestly believes people will pay $900 for a WOA tablet which i think come Xmas he's gonna get a massive shock, what he is gonna see is his new baby is gonna be the next touchpad.
Gotta look on the bright side though, I have a feeling next summer Woot! is gonna be having massive sell offs of the turkeys and i bet the hardware will be nice so all of us who missed out on getting a touchpad will hopefully be able to score on for like $100 and the hackers will figure out a way to put Android on it.
Did you try just disabling the NIC? my net goes down about once every 3 months or so and I've NEVER had a problem playing a Steam game. it simply says something to the effect of "Cannot connection to Steam, do you wish to play in offline mode?" and that's it. after that all my games play just as they'd do if i was online, hassle free.
This is why i buy pretty much all my games from Steam and GOG but won't buy any always on DRM games like the Ubisoft crap nor will i buy D3. its a damned shame as me and my boys were hoping to all buy a copy but if we'd wanted an MMO we'd have went with LOTRO and not D3. So thanks for not taking our money blizzard, we bought 1&2 but now we'll just buy the TL2 4 pack and let the youngest gift the extra copy to a friend.
But we were talking about the history of the clones. Now remember at the time MSFT wasn't shit, they were a couple of smelly nerds in a fricking crappy office. he may have pointed out a better deal or something but if you think gates could have made old big blue do shit then you are wrong. hell the ONLY reason we have those wonderful AMD chips now is that big blue FORCED Intel to allow second sources. of course i'm sure you know later chips came from the Cyrix devs but at the time AMD was simply a cloner that managed to ramp up the speed on some Intel chips.
BTW if you are interested in this stuff look up "AMD developer speaks out Bulldozer' to see one of the former AMD guys lay out why the company went to crap, its pretty enlightening. Sorry I can't look it up for you but I'm chatting with a nephew at the same time as I write this so I'm juggling here, but according to him AMD's previous CEO basically fired all the decent guys and went to automated layouts which gives a good 20%+ speed hit, and then on TOP of that epic fail didn't even bother to tell MSFT about their new designs so that Windows won't really support Faildozer until Win 8. that's one of the reasons i just built a Thuban for the oldest and gave my youngest my Deneb, as i didn't want us to buy Intel because of Faildozer.
And i'll be happy to agree with you that today X86 is simply one of several layers of micro-ops but we are talking about 1982-1999, the era of the rise of the PC and chips back then did NOT for the most part use a translation layer like they do today and yet X86 exploded simply because it could scale REAL well while 68k and others didn't. You have to remember chips were speeding up so quickly that frankly EVERYBODY ended up OCing, just so they wouldn't be completely screwed! I was one of the lucky ones with a Celeron 300a, that damned thing could nearly double the clock on air.
But if you can point me to where gates picked 8088 or even give a hint what I need to look for I'll certainly check it out as i was under the impression he didn't really get any major power until Win 3.x and the breakup of MS OS/2. BTW you want something to get pissed at gates over read this and see how he managed to hold everyone back on DOS based crap just by showing some fake screencaps and BSing his ass off. Even if you don't care for the man you have to admit it took some giant brass balls to pull THAT one off. The funny part is somebody at Apple tried the same trick but then fucked up and gave a developer demo for Copeland which showed, to rip off an old Internet meme "IT'S A FAAAAKE!" by showing the thing couldn't run for a minute or two without crashing. gates was smart enough to ONLY show screencaps and not the actual running OS.
Not to mention so far the whole globalism scam has done nothing but import and export misery. 9 out of the 10 most cancerous cities are in China now, make it top 20 and India is just as bad, meanwhile every job in America is becoming a "McJob" thanks to "Hire not to hire an American".
Frankly i wouldn't even say it was under education, as if the supply and demand curve weren't allowed to be tilted then the demand (and wages and benefits) would go up and people would pursue these careers but instead because Habib can get a degree (or lie his ass off, like 10 years of Win 8 exp) for $10k and it costs 7 times that or more for an American why the fuck should ANY American want to go into ANY of the fields the H1-Bs are currently taking?
It is JUST like what happened with construction. there were MANY Americans willing and happy to work in construction but they found they could hire Juan for $4 an hour and not pay benefits or workman's comp and suddenly there weren't any Americans on the construction sites anymore. it has gotten to bad that teens will yell "Immigra!" just to watch them scatter like deer here. Its fucking sad and pathetic is what it is, our whole damned country has been sold out to a handful at the top and We, the People will get the bill.
Why because I didn't jump in the "M$ Burns babies ZOMFG!" FOSSie circle jerk? this didn't have a damned thing to do with Linux, try sending a Win 7 laptop back with XP and YOU'LL GET THE SAME.
But hey, FOSSies and logic, like gas and fires, probably should be kept apart, ammiright?
I'm actually one that HAS stood up. my family bought D1 and D2 and loved them but we're buying Torchlight II instead. this whole mess just pissed off my boys and me, we were REALLY looking forward to each getting a copy and hooking up online, no more. Now we will hook up in TL2 and spend our money there, that is the only way to deal with a DRM tastic ripoff like this.
Oh and just for the record while i don't mind Steam DRM I will not buy any of the Ubisoft always on games either, so no assassins creed for me and mine, no way.
"All hail the one true god!" which is sadly EXACTLY what you sound like. you can't come up with an argument because the man's bullshit isn't consistent so you go "la la la M$ Ninja poopy head, la la la" which is why the community looks like nutters for associating WITH a nutter.
So be sure to stick your fingers in your ears tightly, make sure those dogma blinders are nice and secure, and I leave you with a final image of your hero acting like a crazy homeless guy. just remember THAT is who you are defending, but hey, don't let logic get in the way of worshiping your deity.
MSFT didn't actually have jack shit to do with 8088 poo, it was the simple fact that thanks to the contract they had signed IBM could second source X86 up to the 286 and thus could build in house or subcontract. it didn't have a damned thing to do with MSFT at that point it was ALL IBM. If you'll look back to the early days of the clones you'll see it was IBM and NOT MSFT that actually gave the cloners their fist break, as IBM refused to go with the 386 because they couldn't produce it in house so Compaq by selling the 386 was able to offer a faster machine at a cheaper price. And Motorola was NEVER able to get the 68k to scale well, saying that money would have magically changed that don't change reality and the fact that when they still had big name companies like Apple depending on them they simply couldn't come through.
And if you'll look at the actual die the X86 translation layer ain't shit, its not even the size of UVD 1 on the itty bitty C Series AMD chips. It is simply a cheap way to get compatibility with literally billions of dollars worth of software that frankly didn't and i would argue wouldn't exist if things had stayed as they were, with every company using a different chip. And if x86 is so crap tell me WHY EXACTLY has nobody come up with ANYTHING better? Itanic sucked for anything that wasn't HIGHLY optimized by the compiler which is damned near impossible to get perfect without stalling, POWER is a pig, ARM doesn't scale without power usage jumping like mad, if what you are saying is true this would be the perfect opportunity to replace it, yet nobody is even attempting it. Why?
Simple, because the X86 instruction set doesn't cause enough overhead to frankly worry about when a good ten times the die space is being used for caches because you simply can't feed the chips fast enough. if x86 was such an overhead then Intel wouldn't be whipping out sub 4w Atoms and AMD wouldn't be cooking up 9w dual cores like flapjacks. X86 works, it works well, it has billions of dollars in programs people want to run, and its cheap. Even with so many sinking shitpiles of money into it ARM hasn't been able to even equal the power of an early Athlon or P4 without having DSPs like broadcom HD decoders to share the load because the chip itself is simply too weak for the task. there is nothing currently in the pipe nor was there anything at the time that could equal the IPC of the X86 CPUs. hell most chips aren't even getting the IPC of the first Core or Phenom chips released a half a decade ago, much less what AMD and Intel are releasing now.
Sheeeit, think THAT is bad? Look up "Ulrich Drepper arrogant" into the search engine of your choice and be prepared to see some EPIC douchebaggery! Seriously some of his rants are so epic I'm shocked he just doesn't reply with Goatse as that's pretty obviously what he thinks about those that DARE to disagree with him.
But you can see why some like Debian would move away, because they simply don't want to deal with such an epic douchenozzle. i have to wonder how many of the other lesser spotlighted FOSS projects have arrogant little all important shits like him running things. After all they aren't doing it for fame or money and we all know how many love to just be absolute assholes when given a little power. But IMHO it shows how the system is broken when someone like Drepper is still allowed to maintain and important piece as Glibc when he is so obviously a massive prick.
Not to mention its the classic self fulfilling prophecy: The POTUS and congress say "Americans need education and tech jobs will save us!" so Americans actually go into these fields...only to see they are supposed to "compete" with someone who paid less than $10k for THEIR degree while they pay several times that, so they don't go for tech degrees and these fortune 100 companies scream "We can't get any people!" (translation...We can't get any people who will work like a dog for scraps!) and the cycle continues to get worse.
Many of the guys I know have bailed out of tech completely simply because corps are following "How NOT to hire an American" as a how to guide and if they DO manage to get the job they are being expected to work 24/7/365 for frankly pathetic pay and the knowledge the corp will outsource them at the very first opportunity they get.
Honestly folks, give you people a SINGLE REASON why they should go into tech and IT, just one. there is ZERO loyalty, the pay is shit, the hours awful, and the corps as with TFA will fuck you over the first chance they get because they can treat Habib like a dog and pay him a good 20% less than you can live on thanks to your student loans. the first thing I told my oldest is DO NOT go into anything tech related and I was damned happy when i found out he wanted to be a doctor.
Lets face it folks as we saw a few weeks back with the article on why so few are going into IT, its because the corps are fucking the tech sector raw with bullshit like this. And despite what the globalists say here it totally is fucking over our country because these indian workers will go home and build the startups of tomorrow that will come up with the next big thing, while our tech and sciences are simply gutted. this destroys the normal give and take of supply and demand because otherwise the corps would be forced to treat workers less shitty and raise wages to get more people to take these roles being filled by H1-Bs, but because they can fuck over Americans AND treat Habib like dogshit the whole thing gets horribly tilted. When the whole thing falls down the corps will simply walk away, its the US citizens that will be left with the high unemployment, lack of Americans able to fill these roles, and debt.
Why did this person get marked as troll? That is pretty much SOP on the "I don't like it" returns, they charge a restock fee and it ends up sold as a return if they don't send it back to the factory and have it refurbed. heck best buy has a website dedicated to selling returns at marked down prices so i don't see why newegg wouldn't do a similar practice.
In the end this seems like a piece of trolling because you can bet your last dollar it don't have a damned thing to do with the OS being Linux, unless anybody here thinks they'd accept some new Windows 7 netbook if I sent it back with XP pro installed instead? We ALL know that when you return something you try to send it back as close to how you got it as possible.
And frankly the buyer in TFA was being a bit of a dumbass anyway. If you actually wanted supported hardware how many times have we heard "Well just buy it from a Linux dealer"? Its not like there is a shortage of Linux laptop dealers ATM, so basically the person in TFA got the lower price thanks to the total bullshit "Windows Tax" (which if it is WinHome or Starter the crapware makes it free and nobody is buying enough linLaptops to make it cheaper to produce than cranking out Windows machines) so this person was giving MSFT a sale for an OS they didn't want to get the lower prices and got bit in the ass. maybe if more people actually bought from Linux dealers instead of being selfish little jerks there would be enough demand for Linux that more places would actually carry it?
But that would ruin a perfectly good trolling article and a ton of "M$ Suxorz!" posts to rack up the page views, can't have that now can we? ;-)
Sigh, I knew i shouldn't click on the response because i just KNEW you were gonna pick and choose tiny points in history instead of thinking big picture. YES X86 was good, we went from less than 20MHz to over a GHz in less than a decade and that was NOT AMD64, which is really just larger registers and some extra microcode, which is ironic that you like AMD64 since it was intel and NOT AMD that was actually trying to kill X86 at the time which led to AMD64. If you remember intel was trying to move everyone to Itanic and it was AMD recognizing the massive amount of Windows software made X86-64 a better move that kept X86 alive.
And I've said for years Intel should have been busted for antitrust, in fact i'd say you had a better case for antitrust over netburst than you did with MSFT over IE, but that is the company and NOT the arch. For the record i don't actually own ANY intel X86 units other than the old P4s in the shop i'm selling, all the machines me and my family own are AMD all the way. it doesn't change the fact they all run X86 code, its simply a preference and a dislike for the anticompetitive behavior of intel.
And arguing over whether the core translates or not is REALLY splitting hairs, because nobody really gives a crap what the core itself is doing, only that it will run the millions of programs already written. this is why i still have to support a few NOS boxes running Win2K because X86 has frankly been better at backwards compatibility than MSFT in this regard. that does NOT change the fact that without the economies of scale that came about because cloners could make a $5000 IBM PC for $1800 then computers as we know them simply wouldn't exist, they'd be toys for the rich just as they were for a good chunk of the 80s. The boom in memory, HDD space, it can all be traced back to having a single interface so that multiple companies could jump in and attempt to make a better mousetrap without having to build an entire computer and market it. Remember that before that the ONLY real way to get into the business was to do like Atari and Commodore and sell a whole system. There were a few local yokels selling for the oldS100 bus but that was it. It wasn't until we had a single platform that anybody could build for that the price dropped out from under the market.